Falen's Evegenii Onegin / khandra

[Henryk Baran]

Dear Ed, it was good indeed. I know I have not responded to Mrs. Sindall,
but I have been rather overwhelmed and have had to put her concerns aside
for the moment. I will do my best to get to Cambridge between the 15th and
23 of May and will look at the materials myself, since much depends on their
condition.
All the best,
Henryk

----- Original Message -----
From: "Deborah Hoffman" <lino59 at AMERITECH.NET>
To: <SEELANGS at LISTSERV.CUNY.EDU>
Sent: Saturday, May 07, 2005 10:02 PM
Subject: [SEELANGS] Falen's Evegenii Onegin / khandra


> Of course you are right on several accounts.  I wasn't
> really trying to defend the translation on the round
> that it was hard, only that it may well have been a
> conscious choice from among several not entirely
> satisfactory options (chondria would not have been my
> choice either!), rather than a mistake in the sense of
> incompetence.  Whether one chooses to err on the side
> of reproducing poetic structure or reproducing exact
> meaning could arguably be a matter of personal
> preference.  Though I can certainly see where someone
> with strong opinions falling one way or another on the
> matter would view the other approach as a gaffe :-).
>
> Now I really have to get my hands on a copy of
> Faflen's translation, because the curiosity is killing
> me!
>
> --Deborah
>
>> Date:    Fri, 6 May 2005 23:43:50 -0400
>> From:    David Powelstock <pstock at BRANDEIS.EDU>
>> Subject: Re: Falen's Evegenii Onegin / khandra
>>
>> Of course it's true that in translating one is
>> always balancing a variety of
>> factors, but that's no excuse for gaffes of this
>> magnitude.  BTW, now that I
>> remind myself of the stanza in question, Pushkin's
>> narrator has already used
>> "angliiskii splin" by this point and is now
>> searching for a Russian
>> equivalent.  Nabokov has, predictably, the utterly
>> opaque "Russian
>> 'chondria'."  (Honestly, if you're going to
>> translate, translate already!)
>> To call it "simply Russian ennui" ends up, in
>> context, being silly.  Maybe
>> "Russian gloom."  But this is an instance in which
>> Falen has allowed the
>> always tenuous balance of literary factors to go out
>> of whack, sacrificing
>> far too much syntactically to the other desiderata.
>> My guess is that he
>> would be glad to have it back.  All translators
>> experience this at one point
>> or another.  But to defend such a slip on the
>> grounds that translation is
>> hard is an insult to translators.  Better to change
>> the line far more
>> radically than Falen has in this instance than to
>> propagate such a crude
>> misanthropologism.
>>
>> My third and fourth cents,
>> David
>> (Powelstock)
>
>
> Deborah Hoffman
> Graduate Assistant
> Kent State University
> Department of Modern and Classical Language Studies
>
> http://www.personal.kent.edu/~dhoffma3/index.htm
>
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